remarkable cures among the tenants of his estate at Busancy. These being given to the public, many other educated men experimented with like success, and in 1825 M. Foissac proposed to the Academy of Medicine to institute a new inquiry. A special committee, consisting of Adelon, Parisey, Marc, Burdin, Sen., with Husson as reporter, united in a recommendation that the suggestion should be adopted. They make the manly avowal that “in science no decision whatever is absolute and irrevocable,” and afford us the means to estimate the value which should be attached to the conclusions of the Franklin committee of 1784, by saying that “the experiments on which this judgment was founded appeared to have been conducted without the simultaneous and necessary assembling together of all the commissioners, and also with moral predispositions, which, according to the principles of the fact which they were appointed to examine, must cause their complete failure.”
What they say concerning magnetism as a secret remedy, has been said many times by the most respected writers upon modern Spiritualism, namely: “It is the duty of the Academy to study it, to subject it to trials; finally, to take away the use and practice of it from persons quite strangers to the art, who abuse this means, and make it an object of lucre and speculation.”
This report provoked long debates, but in May, 1826, the Academy appointed a commission which comprised the following illustrious names: Leroux, Bourdois de la Motte, Double, Magendie, Guersant, Husson, Thillaye, Marc, Itard, Fouquier, and Guenau de Mussy. They began their labors immediately, and continued them five years, communicating, through Monsieur Husson, to the Academy the results of their observations. The report embraces accounts of phenomena classified under thirty-four different paragraphs, but as this work is not specially devoted to the science of magnetism, we must be content with a few brief extracts. They assert that neither contact of the hands, frictions, nor passes are invariably needed, since, on several occasions, the will, fixedness of stare, have sufficed to produce magnetic phenomena, even without the knowledge of the magnetized. “Well-attested and therapeutical phenomena” depend on magnetism alone, and are not reproduced without it. The state of somnambulism exists and “occasions the development of new faculties, which have received the denominations of clairvoyance, intuition, internal prevision.” Sleep (the magnetic) has “been excited under circumstances where those magnetized could not see, and were entirely ignorant of the means employed to occasion it. The magnetizer, having once controlled his subject, may “put him completely into somnambulism, take him out of it without his knowledge, out of his sight, at a certain distance, and through closed doors.” The external senses of the sleeper
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seem to be completely paralyzed, and a duplicate set to be brought into action. “Most of the time they are entirely strangers to the external and unexpected noise made in their ears, such as the sound of copper vessels, forcibly struck, the fall of any heavy substance, and so forth. . . . One may make them respire hydrochloric acid or ammonia without inconveniencing them by it, or without even a suspicion on their part.” The committee could “tickle their feet, nostrils, and the angles of the eyes by the approach of a feather, pinch their skin so as to produce ecchymosis, prick it under the nails with pins plunged to a considerable depth, without the evincing of any pain, or by sign of being at all aware of it. In a word, we have seen one person who was insensible to one of the most painful operations of surgery, and whose countenance, pulse, or respiration did not manifest the slightest emotion.”
So much for the external senses; now let us see what they have to say about the internal ones, which may fairly be considered as proving a marked difference between man and a mutton-protoplasm. “Whilst they are in this state of somnambulism,” say the committee, “the magnetized persons we have observed, retain the exercise of the faculties which they have whilst awake. Their memory even appears to be more faithful and more extensive. . . . We have seen two somnambulists distinguish, width their eyes shut, the objects placed before them; they have told, without touching them, the color and value of the cards; they have read words traced with the hand, or some lines of books opened by mere chance. This phenomenon took place, even when the opening of the eyelids was accurately closed, by means of the fingers. We met, in two somnambulists, the power of foreseeing acts more or less complicated of the organism. One of them announced several days, nay, several months beforehand, the day, the hour, and the minute when epileptic fits would come on and return; the other declared the time of the cure. Their previsions were realized with remarkable exactness.”
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